As grid computing techniques spread in the industry, parallel job schedulers are being extended to schedule jobs across multiple, physically distant machines. However, scheduling jobs in this manner causes various problems. One problem occurs because of the multi-dimensional nature of grid systems. In the past, computer systems have scaled up (by adding larger numbers of nodes) and scaled out (by increasing the number of CPUs at each node), and this has been handled by changes to the job scheduling systems. Now, grid based systems are introducing the new scaling dimension of scaling across multiple machines in the grid. One known method for job scheduling across grid-interconnected machines involves restricting jobs to one of the machines in the grid (for example, using an earliest-start criteria). However, this introduces a problem because node resources can become fragmented under certain job queue situations, so as to reduce the efficiency of the grid computing environment.